Week 2 Reflection

After reading “Why Birds Matter,” I realized that when advocating for things, sometimes logic isn’t enough and you need to stir emotion. Franzen often added his own experience and it many cases it was charming but he lacked logic as well as a lot of research and that was in his favor. He wrote his article in a way that was very accessible to many, with gorgeous pictures of beautiful bird, which likely led to a higher chance of reaching a bigger audience. The past TIME articles we read, while many were just as beautiful with the photos, were very long and had a lot of research in them which may have turned off some readers.

My greatest take-away from the Safina chapter was that humans like to believe that they are infinitely superior to animals. They would like to hold the notion that humans have a monopoly on emotions and awareness. The craziest thing to me is that many behaviorists did not want to even explore the question of animal awareness. They would shun entire careers over just the mention of animals having minds. Safina mentions stories of elephants doing things that in the human world would definitely be considered based on emotions. The most important take-away was that animals should be observed in their environment and not compared to humans.

My research experience has been interesting. I mostly spent more time looking into the details of Jane Goodall’s research and some of the time commitments of animal researchers. The work with empathy in elephants is what I found to be most intriguing so far.